Matt WamplerCEO & Co-Founder, ClearCOGS · CEO & Co-Founder, ClearCOGS 🔪

The $1M Bet on Domain Names That Paid Off Big

25 Jun 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:58

In this segment, Matt Wampler recounts his 2006‑2007 venture of spending roughly $1 million on raw domain names, highlighting purchases such as sportsmemorabilia.com ($12,500), hobbies.com, biking.com, boating.com, yachting.com, and barbecuing.com. He explains how the team focused SEO efforts on sportsmemorabilia.com, optimizing for queries that combine player or team names with terms like "autograph" or "signed memorabilia," which propelled the site to the #1 Google ranking for those searches. This SEO dominance allowed the site to grow into the largest authentic autograph e‑commerce store online, culminating in a sale to Michael Rubin’s Fanatics. The narrative emphasizes the strategic selection of generic, high‑traffic domains, the execution of targeted SEO, and the successful exit.

Chapters

Going back to sportsmemorabilia.com, I bought that as a raw domain name for $12,500 in 2006, and that year and the year after, I spent a million bucks on raw domain names. So spent you know $297,000 on hobbies.com, and nothing was on these names. It was literally just a name. Biking.com bought that. Boating.com, yachting.com, barbecuing.com. But the one that took off was sports. memorabilia.com. And we found a way to get it ranked on Google all the way from 2006. And if you go today to Google, any combination of player name, team name, plus the word autograph signed memorabilia, sportsmemorabilia.com pretty much ranks number 1. And so we grew it into the biggest authentic autograph store on the internet and then sold it to Michael Rubin at Fanatics, which was pretty awesome.